• The NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions document (v1.0, Oct., 2003) describes a set of conventions for an important class of netCDF data.
• Conventions were developed by Brian Eaton (NCAR), Jonathan Gregory (Hadley Centre, UK Met Office), Bob Drach (PCMDI, LLNL), Karl Taylor (PCMDI, LLNL), and Steve Hankin (PMEL, NOAA).
• Climate user community seems to be adopting CF as the de-facto standard way to store and share climate dataset.
• CF conventions are evolving, and a CF goverance structure manages the growth and development of CF.
• New extensions to handle new categories of data are under review. LibCF is playing a part in this process.
• We invite you to contribute any freeware code you may have (or may write) in to handle the CF conventions.

2009 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > libcf: A New Library for CF Conventions Support